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One of the stories that really impressed me was 'Anna Karenina.' As a novel, that made an impression on me, showing me what the novel can do.
Elif Batuman -
From an early age, my favorite thing to read was novels. For years, when I was writing only nonfiction, still I was reading almost exclusively novels. It's weird to be producing something that you don't consume. It feels really alienating.
Elif Batuman
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If, for a moment, it seemed that September 11th could be identified with Iraq, the illusion was short-lived.
Elif Batuman -
Read enough about the dung beetle, and a picture of its character emerges: patient, optimistic, uncomplaining.
Elif Batuman -
The first thing I tried to write was a novel, when I took that time off in grad school. Then I didn't finish it. I went back to school, and then I started writing nonfiction kind of by accident.
Elif Batuman -
Russian literature got me interested in what literature means.
Elif Batuman -
I always wanted to write novels, even before I had read a lot of novels or had a very good idea of what they were.
Elif Batuman -
'Constructed Worlds' comes from a novel draft that I wrote in my early twenties and reread/revised only in my late thirties.
Elif Batuman
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As a novelist, you write about social mores, but not everything can be explained.
Elif Batuman -
For much of my adult life, I believed, inaccurately, that I knew the story of Charles Dickens's 'A Christmas Carol' - that I remembered it from childhood.
Elif Batuman -
Tolstoy didn't know about steampunk or cyborgs, but he did know about the nightmarishness of steam power, unruly machines, and the creepy half-human status of the Russian peasant classes. In 'Anna Karenina,' nineteenth-century life itself is a relentless, relentlessly modern machine, flattening those who oppose it.
Elif Batuman -
Being in a heterosexual relationship for a woman is always implicitly a little bit humiliating.
Elif Batuman -
I had wanted to write 'The Possessed' as fiction, but everyone told me that no one would read a novel about graduate students. It seems almost uncivilized to tell someone writing a novel, 'No, you have to call this a memoir.'
Elif Batuman -
'Awkward' implies both solidarity and implication. Nobody is exempt.
Elif Batuman